Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“What must it be like to grow up that beautiful / with your hair falling into place like dominoes”

Gwyneth: The Biography (2025) by Amy Odell

by Leave a Comment

This is for bingo square ‘favourite’, partly because celebrity memoir/biography is one of my favourite genres, but also because Gwyneth Paltrow has, in one way or another, been the favourite her whole life–favoured of fate and fortune via her parents, acclaimed actress Blythe Danner and producer Bruce Paltrow, cynosure of critics, muse for Calvin Klein and Anna Wintour, tabloid and arty celebrity scene It Girl, Academy darling for her Oscar win at 26 for Shakespeare in Love (1998)—and more chillingly, for a while, as journalist […]

”He still doesn’t know who he’s most scared of: the hooligans with tattoos or the hooligans with ties and suits.”

Us Against You: A Novel by Fredrik Backman

by Leave a Comment

Cbr17bingo Play (hockey) bingo Us Against You is the second novel in Backman’s Beartown trilogy, something I didn’t realize until I was well into the novel. I haven’t read book 1, Beartown, but as it turns out, it doesn’t matter much. Anything important from that story is more or less explained in the course of this one. The trilogy is about the people of Beartown, a small remote town in Sweden, where hockey is more than just a game. It is the heart of the […]

I warmed to this novel, but it took awhile

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

by Leave a Comment

CBR 17 BINGO: Family, because family relationships (police officers Jim & Jack; Anna-Lena and Roger; Ro and Julia; the bank robber and the robber’s children) are motivating factors for the characters Back in 2017, I was, like everyone else, charmed by A Man Called Ove, so when I saw another novel by Fredrik Backman in a Little Free Library, I snapped it up. It started strong when, on the first page, I smiled at this paragraph, “This story is about a lot of things, but […]

Sorry-Grateful

How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch

by 5 Comments

CBR 17 BINGO: White (See cover) When Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, I lost one of my heroes. A theater nerd in college with a proclivity for lyrics over music, I was won over completely by Sondheim’s poetry. Fans can endlessly debate which of his rhymes is most magnificent–the rhyming of “personable” with “coercin’ a bull” in Company is often cited, though I’m inclined to go with the brilliant throw-away line from Into the Woods regarding Jack’s cow, “There’s no time to sit and […]

A cautionary tale for us all

The Lion Women of Tehran: A Novel by Marjan Kamali

by Leave a Comment

Cbr17bingo Culture (would also fit diaspora) Perhaps you have seen this meme recently — a row of eight women wearing western fashions in the 1970s in Iran. These women were members of Parliament, but by the end of the decade, revolution forced Iranian women out of public life and back into traditional garb, covered from head to toe, and subject to punishment for exercising their rights. I’m old enough to remember when the Shah went into exile and the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to […]

“Me, I don’t have a name. I lost it in battle, like the knight who lost his shield.”

The Coin: A Novel by Yasmin Zaher

by Leave a Comment

Cbr17bingo Migrant (bingo) The main character has moved from her native Palestine to the US  The Coin is narrated by an unnamed main character, a woman maybe in her 30s who left Palestine for New York City but has an uncomfortable relationship with the city and its people. She is telling her story to someone. Is she talking to another unnamed person? To us? To herself? The narrator is fascinating, intelligent woman of wealth and taste, but she also a few neuroses that make her […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo